Reimagining a Shadowy Medieval Brotherhood That Probably Didn’t Exist

The novelist and screenwriter John Crowley believes that “The Chemical Wedding,” the third major Rosicrucian text, is not an occult allegory but the first novel of science fiction or fantasy.

In the early seventeenth century, a series of anonymous pamphlets were published in Germany, announcing the existence of the Fraternity of the Rosy Cross, a fellowship of mystics and alchemists who, it was claimed, were working in secret to transform European politics and religion. The first of the pamphlets, which were later called the Rosicrucian manifestos, was the “Fama Fraternitatis Rosae Crucis,” and it described a figure called C.R., who learned of magic and alchemy as he travelled through the Orient, two hundred years earlier, and then returned to Europe to share his new knowledge. A second pamphlet, “Confessio Fraternitatis,” appeared not long afterward, laying out the purpose and intentions of the fellowship and inviting others into the brotherhood, where they would “find more wonderful secrets by us then heretofore they did attain.” (This quote is taken from Thomas Vaughan’s translation of the manifestos, republished by Ouroboros Press in 2012.) These secrets would be revealed, the pamphlet explains, but only to a few, at first; in the meantime, they would be “declared in figures and pictures” that would one day become more widely understood. In 1616, a third document, “The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz,” appeared. “Rosenkreutz” is a German play on “Rosy Cross,” and seemed to be the mysterious C.R. of the “Fama.”

In her landmark book “The Rosicrucian Enlightenment,” published in 1972, the historian Frances Yates concluded that the Fraternity of the Rosy Cross did not actually exist—but she also argued that the documents had helped to prompt a new way of thinking about the world, one that not only attempted to “penetrate to deep levels of religious experience” but inspired investigations in science and math as well.* This legacy had been obscured, she wrote, because “the advancing scientific revolution” was “eager to cast off the chrysalis out of which it [was] emerging.” Over the centuries, the Rosicrucian myth became the ur-legend for tales of shadowy groups using magic to alter the course of history. It influenced a number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century magical and mystical Christian orders, some of which claimed to have a direct lineage with the Rosicrucians. (Even Freemasons have claimed an early link to the group.) And the central idea of the manifestos—that through the application of magic and alchemy we might learn that we are a microcosm of the divine—helped to shape, along with Hermeticism, the occult imagination.

In the centuries since, that tradition has informed the work of many artists and writers, among them the novelist and screenwriter John Crowley, now seventy-three. Crowley is perhaps best known for “Little, Big,” his 1981 novel about a family’s long and intimate history with the fairy world, and for the “Aegypt” tetralogy, which delves into the lives of key Renaissance occultists. Crowley has just published an annotated reworking of the third Rosicrucian text, titled “The Chemical Wedding by Christian Rosencreutz: A Romance in Eight Days by Johann Valentin Andreae.” Because he doesn’t know German, Crowley pieced together the book by comparing various English translations, deciding on the most readable and sensible interpretation of a given passage and then putting all of it in a new voice. Over the phone from his house in Conway, Massachusetts, Crowley told me that, in so doing, he hoped to strip away some of the cultural mystery surrounding the text. He believes that “The Chemical Wedding” is not an occult allegory, as many modern readers assume. Rather, he says, it is the first novel of science fiction or fantasy—a speculation about the future as well as a comment on its own time.

Is Crowley right? The answer to that question starts with Johann Valentin Andreae, a Lutheran theologian who claimed in his autobiography, “Vita Ab Ipso Conscripta,” to have written “The Chemical Wedding” as a ludibrium, “a sort of youthful prank,” as Crowley puts it in his introduction. Much has been made of Andreae seeming to dismiss his own work, but, as Yates notes in “The Rosicrucian Enlightenment,” Andreae is specifically referring to an early version of “The Chemical Wedding,” written in 1603, well before the Rosicrucian manifestos made their appearance. When he revised the work, years later, he was clearly responding to the manifestos—though just what he meant by his response remains difficult to say.

In the version of “The Chemical Wedding” that is available today, Christian Rosencreutz is visited by an angelic being, adorned with wings “full of eyes like a peacock’s,” who presents him with an invitation to the wedding of a king and queen. Becoming a guest will not be simple: Christian is put through a series of tests, and his virtues are weighed on a scale. Those who don’t pass these tests are executed. Christian passes, and is then led through a series of strange experiences: standing inside a giant globe emblazoned with the constellations, encountering a collection of singing statues, witnessing the distillation of fluids from corpses. The book culminates with Christian’s involvement in complex laboratory preparations, including the creation of a bird that is then killed; its ashes are used to make two homunculi, which, in the laboratory, grow to become the bridal couple.

With these strange, seemingly symbolic episodes, Andreae was not, in Crowley’s view, trying to convey esoteric truths that could change the world. Rather, he was creating a fantastical satire about serious things. “The Chemical Wedding” is full of outlandish set pieces—candles that walk on their own; a queen’s gown so beautiful it can’t be gazed upon—that might suggest an allegorical reading. But their imagery, as Crowley points out in his footnotes, is inconsistent: any allegory is defeated by the book’s sheer incongruity. The openness of the Rosicrucian manifestos to wildly varying interpretations caused something of a panic when they were first published—Crowley told me that people wondered whether they should interpret them as part of a new movement for social reform or as the sign of “a demonic force that’s sweeping through society, and that’s going to destroy all princes and throw kings off their thrones and plunge us all into who knows what.” It’s possible, Crowley writes, that Andreae was poking fun of the very people who believed the Rosicrucians were real.

But what the purely allegorical reading really misses, Crowley says, is that these pamphlets were published at a time when actual physical experimentation was already taking place. Alchemists combined mystical thinking with crude forms of natural science, or what was then called “natural magic.” They believed that their own spiritual condition was an integral part of the success of their experiments, which they recorded in coded ways, using images of marriage, conception, and birth in order to occlude what they were doing with their molten metals and crushed herbs. They believed that the “Great Work,” as it was called, was part of an ancient quest for immortality, and that the new form of gold would become a life-sustaining material. But trying to transmute lead and other base metals into gold required genuine knowledge of certain elements and a willingness to test ideas against physical experimentation. Eventually, chemistry became a separate and important part of the scientific venture.

If this early, science-driven alchemical vision is behind “The Chemical Wedding,” then the book starts to look like a novel of speculative fiction, or what Crowley calls, in the introduction, “a marvelous adventure rather than simply a parable”—a sort of seventeenth-century “Gulliver’s Travels,” perhaps. “The Chemical Wedding” imagines a future that involves fantastic machines, like “statues or figures that moved by themselves just as if they were alive,” and a giant sphere that functions as a planetarium.

But Crowley’s attempt to frame the novel as science fiction is, I think, only half right. While the text arises out of a backdrop of “new and unfolding science,” the Rosicrucian myth is crucial to the shape that it took. Whether a hoax or a deliberate appeal for spiritual revolution, the manifestos were not an attempt to laud reason and science as the world’s salvation: the first Rosicrucian texts point backward, to a golden age of magic and arcane wisdom that, the texts suggest, could once again enlighten the world if we only would return to them.

There are people who still believe this. Despite Andreae’s claim that “The Chemical Wedding” was a youthful fancy_,_ contemporary Rosicrucian-influenced organizations hold up the document as an important symbolic work. They do not necessarily believe that the Rosicrucian order itself existed—a member of Societas Rosicruciana in Civitatibus Foederatis, a Masonic Christian organization, explained to me in an e-mail that many of his fellow-members are quick to accept “The Chemical Wedding” and other Rosicrucian texts as hoaxes. They nonetheless regard these works as “useful,” and “carriers of truth.” The Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis, founded in 1909 by H. Spencer Lewis, calls itself the “the most prominent modern representative” of Rosicrucianism. The organization’s Web site describes “The Chemical Wedding” as a text that “leads us toward the vision of a better world through an alchemical dream.”

Crowley has an immunity to such “occult thinking,” he told me—but he’s nonetheless sympathetic to those sorts of interpretations. “I am entranced and intrigued with these modes of thought and ways of investing the world with wonder and astonishing qualities,” he said. Fundamentally, in his view, the “mythic realms of thought and feeling” described in the Rosicrucian pamphlets offered to Andreae “a magical system that could be used in what is sort of, in effect, a fantasy novel.” And so he sees in Andreae’s work something not unlike his own creative process—that is, a use of the alchemical and the occult imagination in service to a story.

To illustrate this point, Crowley related an incident from the life of William Butler Yeats, who was deeply immersed in the occult revival of the late nineteenth century. In the introduction to his strange and obsessive book “A Vision,” Yeats writes about how, shortly after he was married, his wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees, suggested that they try automatic writing, in an attempt to channel communications from a spirit guide. The “disjointed sentences” that resulted so excited Yeats that he proposed to the “unknown writer” who was guiding him that he devote his life to deciphering these apparently coded messages. “No,” the spiritual voice apparently answered. “We have come to bring you metaphors for poetry.” The point, in other words, is not adhering to occult ritual but stretching one’s imagination. “I’m with Yeats,” Crowley said.

*An earlier version of this sentence misspelled the name Frances Yates.

Peter Bebergal is the author of “Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll.”